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A backlash from parents of English language learners over a plan that would have restricted teachers to teaching in English only after the first grade has prompted officials in California's Alisal Union School District to introduce a gradual transition option. The option, created by a committee of 11 bilingual teachers in the district, allows the teaching in both English and Spanish from kindergarten through the end of second grade. Previously, Spanish could be spoken through the end of third grade.

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The Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program provides teaching support to foreign language departments at U.S. colleges that serve minority populations and are in rural areas or those with a small enrollment. This year, 422 teaching assistants from 49 countries are involved. Lincoln University in Pennsylvania has dropped two-thirds of its foreign language courses in the past seven years, but the four Fulbright teaching assistants have almost doubled the size of its foreign languages faculty this year.

A distance-learning program is allowing one instructor to teach Mandarin Chinese to students in six classrooms in five Pennsylvania school districts. Guest teachers from China teach the lessons via the Internet and can interact with students in real time, similar to a traditional class. "It's important that they can interact in the same way, they can make that eye-to-eye contact," one administrator said.

Bilingual education researchers are focused on how the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act can be done to provide the most benefit to English language learners, Stanford University education professor Kenji Hakuta said in a recent speech on equity in education. Hakuta, who has studied ELLs for three decades, said one issue that looms large is standardizing the process for identifying and reclassifying ELLs to improve data collection and research.

Students who are enrolled in bilingual programs outperform their peers in English and math after the sixth grade, according to a San Jose State University professor who has spent two decades studying bilingual programs in 10 states. "In the end, they are stronger in English because they are stronger in Spanish," Kathryn Lindholm-Leary told attendees at a conference on bilingual education in El Paso, Texas.

Despite an influx of federal funds, experts predict that 135,000 teachers will be out of work this year because of cuts to education funding. As the school year begins, many districts face increased class sizes, decreased workforces, fewer programs and new student fees. In California's Modesto City Schools district, the head of the teachers union said students in kindergarten through third grade will get less individual attention after the district raised average class sizes from 20 to 25 to help fill a $25 million budget shortfall.